Just ordinary people with their everyday problems. Too ordinary and too
everyday for my taste, alas -- been-there-saw-that levels alarmingly
high (I predicted exactly which tentative grace note the film would end
on, roughly an hour beforehand), and Winterbottom's juxtaposition of
Dogma-style immediacy and tricked-up expressionism seems more like a
distraction from the script's inadequacies than like any kind of coherent
vision. Performances nothing special, either -- competent, certainly, but
little more. Underwhelming all around, really. What are people are so
excited about? You'd think nobody'd ever made an ensemble piece about
sub/urban alienation centered around three sisters before.

Cecil B. Demented (John
Waters): C

Not so much a movie as an extremely long, sporadically witty promo for the
Independent Film Channel. Waters has never been much of a visual stylist,
and he's certainly no deep thinker (not to say that he's stupid, mind, but
his movies aren't remotely about ideas); it's as a provocateur, not as an
auteur, that we value him. Now that folks as diverse as the Farrelly Bros
and Todd Solondz have usurped his role as trangression's point man,
however, his work seems flat, uninspired, oddly devoid of purpose. (See
Dennis Harvey's fine piece in the new Film Comment for a more
in-depth exploration of JW's perhaps inevitable obsolescence.) Lately, he
seems content merely to spin his once-anarchic wheels, offering lame,
sub-Leno gags about Patch Adams: The Director's Cut and verging
more often than not into circle jerk territory; when no fewer than ten
(10) of Demented's cronies stepped forward, one at a time, and proudly
displayed a tattoo featuring the name of a prominent indie icon (everybody
from Herschell Gordon Lewis to Spike Lee), I felt like I ought to be
taking notes -- and for a class I'd audited many years previously, no
less. Melanie Griffith has a little fun with her image makeover as a
trash-talkin', budget-scornin', autonomy-espousin' cinematic freedom
fighter, and Stephen Dorff is at least consistently manic, but this paean
to the spirit of guerrilla cinema amounts to little more than a weary
battle cry directed at its director's numerous successors. Cecil be
devoid. [TONY #255]

Hollow Man (Paul
Verhoeven): B

Satisfyingly nasty, from its startling, gruesome opening scene until just
before the requisite overextended climax (another tedious exercise in
serial spontaneous resuscitation). Verhoeven's presence admittedly feels a
bit muted here, his subversion of Hollywood tropes rather perfunctory --
though it can't be an accident that ostensible heroes E. Shue (reverting
to the prettily bland quality that she perfected for Cocktail) and
J. Brolin Jr. (looking for all the world as if he's mistakenly wandered
onto the set from a fitting for a GQ layout) both come across as
more vacant than the eye sockets of Bacon's latex life mask, whereas
Bacon's performance gets more and more vivid even as his temperament grows
more and more vicious. Sporting a smile that forever seems to be on the
verge of curling into a sneer (and often does), the Kevster has always
excelled at lending a touch of humanity to flawed, fundamentally
unsympathetic protagonists; the visionary genius/arrogant jerk he plays
here might be an older version of Fenwick, the intelligent but immature
layabout he played in Diner. Needless to say, his invisible dude
pays for his transgressions...but the movie celebrates the character's
anarchic impulses all the same, and I must confess that I got a
guilt-edged charge from its brand of sadistic
mischief. Special effects are pretty keen, too, both in
the transformation sequences and in the numerous inventive ways that
Bacon's familiar features are revealed after he vanishes -- I'd expected
little more than a voiceover, but he's very much present. Ultimately,
Hollow Man does seem a little, yeah, hollow -- certainly it lacks
the emotional pull of David Cronenberg's superficially similar remake of
The Fly -- but it diverted me while I was watching it, and that's
all that I ever ask. [TONY #254]

State and Main (David
Mamet): A

[Review withheld until first public or critics' screening; I was kindly
permitted to attend one set up only for feature editors and other
bigwigs. But this is the funniest movie I've seen in years -- sort of a
sweet-natured variation on his equally hilarious
Speed-the-Plow. It's about purity. Go you Huskies!] [Opens 22 December 2000 in NYC.]

Space Cowboys (Clint
Eastwood): C+

Clint, buddy, please, as a favor to me: read the damn scripts! Certainly
there's no denying your mastery of the medium, and your semi-anachronistic
instincts are a national treasure; but really, the sow's ear thing has
gotta stop -- in case you haven't noticed, your last few purses wound up
being constructed from something a lot less sumptuous than silk. And this
latest one begins so sublimely, too, with Lennie Niehaus' elegiac,
Unforgivenesque guitar noodling accompanying a lovely view of the
earth as seen from outer space, over which you superimpose the film's
title -- adjective and noun evoked by image and sound, respectively. Gave
me chills. Ditto the subsequent shot of a flat, arid b&w landscape, quiet
and still until a jet plane unexpectedly roars into the frame from the
distant horizon, so quickly that it vanished almost before its contour
had registered on my retinas. Elegant, confident...perfect. Then the
characters started talking, and the plot kicked in, and phfft. Honestly, I
stuck with this one for quite a while -- giving you the benefit of the
doubt; trying not to wince at all the generic codger humor (Sutherland's
dirty-old-man routine gets tiresome fast, for the record); overlooking the
rather obvious fact that Tommy Lee Jones is a good decade younger than the
rest of Team Daedalus; enjoying the easy, grizzled rapport among a group
of actors who've collectively appeared in over 300 feature films and have
nothing left to prove. But I'm afraid you lost me completely with that
third-act plot twist. You know what I'm talking about: the big
Skylab-related revelation that turns the picture into a melanin-free
version of Armageddon. 'Fess up: did you make even a token effort
to establish any kind of real-world plausibility? Or were you afraid --
and rightly so, I might add -- that if anybody looked at that part of the
screenplay too closely, they'd discover that the movie's basic premise was
suspect? And did you bother to check out the CVs of the dudes who wrote
this mess? One of them was responsible for Muppets from Space! He
specializes in STUPID SPACE MOVIES! You need to know these things. You
need help. Please, hire an assistant who can distinguish between good
writing and bad. You only have a few movies left. [TONY
#254]

New Waterford Girl (Allan
Moyle): B

Let's see: the protagonist is a small, dark, intense girl given to fits of
melancholy. Her new friend/nemesis, blonde and vivacious, flaunts her
contempt for societal convention and spends much of the film clocking
people who incur her wrath. Can't say for sure, since I strenuously
avoided the object of comparison (Oscar or no, Angelina Jolie in feisty
mode makes me itch), but isn't this basically New Waterford Girl,
Interrupted? No matter: while Sheila Fish's coming-of-age scenario --
small-town rebel seeks escape, adventure, adulthood -- doesn't exactly
till new soil, her sharp, singularly witty (and plainly
autobiographical) script compensates with a strong sense of locale
(suggested tourism slogan: "Cape Breton -- Dreary, but Evocatively So!"),
a wealth of wonderfully offbeat details, and a welcome tendency to veer
in unexpected directions. Moyle and his cast wisely refrain from playing
wink-wink games with the audience, allowing them to sell such potentially
precious conceits as Lou's ability to determine a man's guilt or innocence
via a single punch; even the film's loopiest moments are staged with
near-Bressonian rigor, to hilarious effect. Late in the film, our
distraught heroine pleads to the heavens for a sign, just any kind of a
sign...whereupon a strange young man wanders into frame, apparently out of
nowhere, explaining with great significance that the sweater he's wearing
happens to be the very same one that his mother had on when she died,
right after eating a peanut butter sandwich. As he saunters away, she
turns to her pal, furrowing her brow: "That wasn't actually helpful, was
it?" Maybe not, but it made my day. [TONY #253]

The Tao of Steve
(Jenniphr Goodman): C+

Word on the street was that Donal Logue handily walks away with this
Sundance fave, and yes indeed he does -- though that's largely because the
film itself, made with enthusiasm aplenty but little narrative imagination
and zero visual flair, is so generically featherweight, so determinedly
flimsy, that only Logue's extra girth prevents it from blowing away in a
light Santa Fe wind. Co-written by the director's sister
(CAUTION! CAUTION!) -- who also plays the female lead
(WARNING! WARNING!) -- in collaboration with the guy who inspired the
main character (ABORT! ABORT! ABORT!), it turns out to be yet another
tale of arrested adolescence, featuring a scheming but fundamentally
decent lothario who learns to express emotional vulnerability once he
meets the right woman; apart from the size of its protagonist (is it
supposed to be a revelation that overweight guys can manage to get laid
by being sufficiently witty and charming?) and the titular romantic
philosophy (basically an XY variation on The Rules, emphasizing
detachment, apathy, and the actually-not-entirely-unsound notion that "we
pursue those things which retreat from us"), there's little to
distinguish it from the approximately 50 similar low-budget indies each
year that screen twice at the IFFM before being consigned for eternity to
a shelf in somebody's garage. Good for a few laughs, I'll concede (though
it's probably significant that I can't recall a single one of them a week
later), but mostly it follows a very familiar trajectory in an utterly
nondescript manner; even Logue's roguish, immensely appealing (but
undemanding) performance gradually wears thin. (I suspect it'll be
overpraised, simply because he's a new face -- at least in a role of this,
uh, magnitude -- and we're unaccustomed to his mannerisms.) Not a bad
movie, just a thoroughly innocuous one : you'll smile, you'll shrug,
you'll have to stop and think for a moment five years hence when somebody
asks whether you saw it. Presuming anybody would even bother to ask, that
is. [TONY #254]

Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute): C+

Sure, Being There was a fine comic fable -- "full of savagely witty
comments on American life in the television age," per Maltin -- but
really, wouldn't it have been just that much more enthralling had Chance
the gardener been unwittingly on the run from a couple of squabbling
hitmen? If there were drugs stashed in the trunk of his car? Adds
some much-needed edge, no? {Sigh.} LaBute, directing somebody's else
script for the first time, seems confused about whether he's making
another subversive arthouse picture or a bit of high-concept fluff, and
winds up fumbling with aspects of both, though only the contrived,
crowd-pleasing elements really work. Chief among these is a truly
inspired, deliciously extended sequence in which Betty's delusion is
misinterpreted, Kosinski-style, as the unconventional audition of a very
committed and persistent Method actor, culminating in a knuckle-biter of a
meltdown that provides the solipsistic catharsis I'd expected from The Truman Show. Terrific stuff,
particularly Zellweger's intense, increasingly disturbing
performance; unfortunately, it follows an hour or more of tiresome setup
-- jam-packed with irritatingly trite comments on American life in the
television age (an age America is arguably no longer in, or at least
beginning to move out of); attenuated by frequent cutaways to the screen's
latest pair of squabbling hitmen (whatever the hell Chris Rock is doing,
he should have been doing something else); and just generally other than
involving. (Plus, there's something fundamentally wrong with a Neil LaBute
movie in which you're relieved when Aaron Eckhart disappears from
view; that he was better utilized in Erin
Brockovich is one of the year's least pleasant surprises.) Persistent
attempt to thematically rhyme Charlie's idealization of Betty with Betty's
idealization of Dr. David Ravell comes off as painfully
self-conscious; revelation at film's end, despite being expertly
foreshadowed, comes off as desperately ad hoc. Pretty flimsy, really...yet
that one sequence refuses to vacate my brain, and I'm likely to see the
film again if it turns up at Toronto (yes, I'm going this year), just to
re-experience those 15 minutes. Make of that what you will. [Opens September 2000 in New York City.]

Chuck & Buck (Miguel
Arteta): C+

[slight spoiler, but you'd have to be pretty dim not to
see it coming]

Unquestionably a crock -- and a hideously ugly crock at that, its murky
medium and long shots making the Digital Revolution feel more like a
threat than a promise -- but what kind of crock depends upon which of two
possible movies actor/screenwriter Mike White was attempting to make. If
he began with the premise of two men who'd experimented sexually as
children, one of whom still desires the other in adulthood, then
infantilizing the aggressor was a chickenshit move, clearly designed to
elicit easy sympathy. (I'm seeing comparisons made to Rupert Pupkin, but
the genius of De Niro's characterization is that Rupert never ever ever
ever ever comes across as adorable or misunderstood.) On the other
hand, if the point of departure was the theme of arrested adolescence,
made literal in the form of man-child Buck and his longing to return to
carefree days of endless oodley oodley oodley fun fun fun (whoever wrote
that song is dead meat, by the way -- reverberated in my brain all weekend
long, and even repeated and potentially inflammable substitutions of
Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" couldn't exorcise the damn thing), then
introducing the sexual element was unforgivably crass -- little more than
a misguided attempt to give what's essentially a small, delicate story
some indie-cool "edge." Either way, the result is glaringly phony
(although considerably less so than Arteta's previous effort, thankfully), culminating
in a ludicrous, because-the-script-says-so climax that simply would not
happen as depicted, period, no arguments, didn't even buy
it. (Chris Weitz's passive, monotonous performance as the film's shallow
object of desire doesn't help matters; he so successfully voids Charles of
any interior life that he has nothing to give when his big moment finally
arrives.) Most irritating of all, however, are the numerous scenes
depicting the creation of Hank & Frank...because, miraculously,
they work like a charm (apart from being hideously ugly, I mean), thus
making it impossible for me to do the full-on Bristol stomp that catharsis
demands. Every time Lupe Ontiveros appeared onscreen as house manager
Beverly, effortlessly juxtaposing maternal warmth and deadpan attitude, I
prayed that the narrative would abandon the two tedious title characters
and follow her around instead. Movie acting doesn't get much more oodley
oodley.

What Lies Beneath (Robert
Zemeckis): C-

Grade's a bit misleading, as it's really more of a B-/D- split...or, to
(a) put it another way and (b) offer the hard-up DreamWorks publicity
department a potential blurb, this is "far and away the best crappy movie
I've seen so far this year!" Derivative proficiency and hackneyed
clumsiness duke it out throughout acts I and II, with Zemeckis's expertly
deliberate pacing and Pfeiffer's superbly volatile performance
establishing an atmosphere of palpable unease that's only occasionally
undermined by clunky exposition and laughably blatant setups for
forthcoming twists. (One extra to another, of a drug that causes motor
paralysis in mice: "So, does this work on all mammals?") As matters
turn from suggestive to explicit, however, plausibility and coherence
gurgle down the drain; the climax, in which a perfectly ordinary character
abruptly metamorphoses into an indestructible horror-movie psychopath,
must be seen to be derisively hooted at. I spent practically the entire
picture on the edge of my seat -- sometimes due to a shift in posture
provoked by nervous tension, but more often because of my increasing
desire to flee the theater before something really stupid
happened. Note to self: trust instincts. [TONY
#252]

Girl on the Bridge
(Patrice Leconte): C

Stylish enough, I suppose -- it's a pleasure, if nothing else, to see b&w
photography that actually emphasizes the blacks and whites, unlike the
sepia-inflected variety that seems to be in favor nowadays -- but also
fatally muddled, tossing every imaginable ingredient into the cauldron in
the vain hope of cooking up something truly magical. Our theme is pretty
clearly The Nature of Chance ("What was your first clue, o paragon of
perspicacity?" "Well, I confess that the words "la chance" made little
impression upon me the first six or seven thousand times that they were
spoken aloud, but once the number hit quintuple digits, my interpretative
gears began a-meshin'..."), but it's not enough, apparently, that plucky,
downtrodden human target Vanessa Paradis have a knack for winning at the
roulette wheel. No, she and brooding cutlery-hurler Daniel Auteuil (he won
the César for this?!) also share a hokey telepathic bond,
which -- as luck would have it, one might suggest, were one feeling more
charitable than I -- mysteriously surfaces just when the narrative seems
to be running out of steam. The slew of portentous coincidences,
meanwhile, suggests that screenwriter Serge Frydman is working with a
definition of "luck" culled from the same dictionary consulted by Alanis
Morrisette vis-à-vis "irony." Just a lot of fanciful huffing and
puffing, to little effect -- though I'll long treasure the memory of the
film's unintentionally hilarious metaphorical sex scene, with Paradis
moaning and thrashing in ecstasy each time one of Auteuil's knives thwacks
into the wood just scant centimeters from her quivering flesh. (At least
Cronenberg knew that people masturbating while watching crash-test
footage was ludicrous.) A lot depends, in fact, upon whether or not you're
captivated by the allegedly incandescent visage of Ms. Paradis; I spent
the whole movie trying to decide whether her cheekbones are more or less
prominent than Johnny Depp's, and whether the two of them ever wound each
other when necking. [TONY #253]

Water Drops on Burning
Rocks (François Ozon): C+

So much for the auteur theory. I doubt that even the most ardent
Francophile could identify this schematic portrait of romantic
sadomasochism as Ozon's handiwork, were the credits elided; anybody
possessing even the most cursory familiarity with Fassbinder's tender,
grotesque gallery of victims and misanthropes, on the other hand, could
peg it as an adaptation or homage inside of ten minutes. Based on
juvenilia -- the play was unproduced during Fassbinder's lifetime, and for
good reason -- it's interesting mostly as evidence of how early the
director's singular sensibility was formed; the addition of a thin Ozon
layer (e.g., he's made one character a M --> F
transsexual) notwithstanding, Water Drops follows the standard RWF
trajectory to the letter: naïve protagonist encounters sadistic,
predatory bastard(s); enters unrewarding life of voluntary
submission; briefly considers escape (actual escape attempt
optional); winds up dead and unmourned. (A brief, amusing musical
interlude that's featured in the film's trailer seems to exist largely to
be featured in the film's trailer.) Performances, needless to say, are
exemplary -- Anna Thomson's dolorous castoff in particular -- and I'll
even confess, in the Way the Hell More than You Wanted to Know Dept., that
this is the first movie since Pola X to bring me to, uh, full mast
right there in the theater. (No unsimulated blowjobs, but Ludivine Sagnier
removes her clothes virtually the second she appears onscreen, and never
quite manages to replace them.) Doesn't remotely transcend its theatrical
origin, though -- single location, endless jabber -- and a little of
Fassbinder's matter-of-fact cruelty goes rather a long way, at least for
me. After a while, the feeling is more like water drops on immobilized
forehead. [TONY #251]